


Kindred

by AceSpaceDog



Series: Wake My Spirit [1]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Less than canon typical violence, Occasional violence, Pre-Canon, Pre-Series, Vague Supernatural Elements, Young Arthur Morgan, Young!ARTHUR, and one important oc, but i mean VAGUE, various unimportant ocs - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-26 00:18:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20380537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceSpaceDog/pseuds/AceSpaceDog
Summary: Arthur has been on his own for a few weeks now, and the way things are going, he won't last long. Sure he's smart and resourceful, but he's also alone, and both the wilds and the cities can be cruel to those without a home. As Arthur struggles to find his feet in his new life as an orphan, he finds a kindred spirit in an unlikely but equally lonely source.





	Kindred

** _Yuma, November 1874_ **

Arthur shivered and wrapped his arms tightly around himself as an unseasonable chill whipped through the Tucson streets. The action provided little relief, however, as no amount of huddling would stoke his body’s fire without the necessary fuel. It had been a little over a month since his father hanged just outside San Diego, and Arthur, upon learning that the good people of the growing city had little time for roustabouts and whelps, hopped the first coach he could reasonably hide aboard. He had no objective, no destination except wherever he could survive, so when the coach turned down the dusty road with the setting sun at his back, Arthur decided that east was as good a place as any.

It was luck, more than anything, that saw him through to Yuma almost completely unmolested. It wasn’t until a wagon wheel cracked with barely two miles left to the town limits that the driver almost found him hidden behind some luggage in the boot. Arthur, having sensed that his luck was almost out, managed to pick some money from the bags. When he heard the wheel groan and then crack, he hightailed it out into the darkness of the desert, small fist clutched around three dollars and change.

That was weeks ago, and he still had no idea what he was going to do. All he had done recently was earn himself a black eye from local gang leader, Oliver Lee. Oliver wasn’t much older than Arthur—he didn’t think—but he was much bigger, much meaner, and much dumber. All his brains were in his meaty hands, and Arthur had said as much when Oliver first tried to shake him down for what little change he left. His mouth would be the end of him, he thought idly as he watched that ham-sized fist careen towards his face. Since then, Oliver made a point of roughing him up almost everyday for the last two weeks. Sure, Arthur tried to hide, tried to fight, tried to run, tried to plead, but Oliver was as single-minded as he was stupid, so Arthur took to hiding his pickings instead.

It was only now that he was heading back to his little cache of change on the outskirts of town that he realized he underestimated Oliver. The boy may be thick but at least one of his number had a head on his shoulders. Arthur’s stomach dropped when he reached into a niche in a wall and found nothing but sand and dirt. They must have tailed him. Realizing his mistake, Arthur stood to leave as quickly as possible, but huge hands had him by the shoulders, roughly pining him against the wall.

“Thought you was being clever, huh?” Oliver’s grip on the back of Arthur’s neck tightened. “Well? You though you could mosey on into my town, pick my pockets, and get away without paying me for lettin’ you stay here?”

Arthur mumbled something under his breath which earned him another sharp shove into the unyielding stone. “What was that?”  
“Ain’t your pockets I was pickin’.” This time he got a punch just below his ribs. Arthur would give Oliver two things: 1. The boy knew how to hurt without causing any serious damage, and 2. He at least had the stones to do it himself.

“All the pockets here are my pockets! We been runnin' this town for almost three years now and ain’t had no problems ‘til you showed up.”

“If one starving orphan is causin’ you trouble, you ain’t much of a gang, huh?” As the words spilled from Arthur’s mouth he once again had the thought that it would be his mouth that finally did him in. Hell, maybe that time would be right now, and he wouldn’t have to worry about learning to curb his attitude. Regardless, Arthur struggled against Oliver’s grip even as the older boys set into him with their fists and feet.

Arthur wasn’t sure how long the assault lasted, but when they were done, he could barely open his left eye and his right was already swollen shut. He shivered, suddenly remembering the chill the November air had taken. The rest of his body groaned in protest as he wrapped his arm around his midsection and tried to gather his feet under him. Again, Oliver and company worked him over just enough to be agonizing, but not blindly so. This was a lesson, and one with which Arthur was already intimately familiar. He knew he needed to eat, needed to drink, needed to find a place to rest if he wanted to heal right, but he also knew that the people of Yuma were just like the people of San Diego, or Fresno, or anywhere else really. Money made the world go ‘round, and without it he was worthless.

Luckily several shops and outdoor food stalls were still open, and Oliver had failed to take Arthur’s greatest assets: his hands. Lyle Morgan hadn’t taught his son much, if anything, except how to make himself useful to his father. When the man was piss drunk or passed out, it was on Arthur to get money and food, so he became quite adept at nicking a loaf of bread or bottle of whiskey here and there. After slowly pushing himself off the ground, Arthur bent down to pick up his father’s hat, and plopped it on his head. If he was going to be stealing, the least he could do was be better at it than his father had been.

He staggered slightly but pulled himself to his full and unremarkable height before heading towards the bakery. In the two weeks he had been here, the bakery had been his most consistent take. If he really thought about, Arthur might have realized his hands weren’t as quick as he thought so much as the baker’s wife had taken a shining to him. Still, he would thank whatever power let him get off with a whole country loaf stuffed under his threadbare shirt. He’d thank them again for letting him get to a secluded area outside city limits where he’d been hunkered down recently.

Arthur eased himself to the ground between a grouping of rocks that provided a surprising amount of protection from the elements. He tore into his bread, the tough crust difficult to chew with his aching face. But as he ate, the aching in his belly eased somewhat, until Arthur was left with nothing but his thoughts to occupy his mind. “Idle hands are the devil’s tools,” his father used to say. Well, the way things were going, Arthur was entirely the devil’s, if such a being existed, idle hands or not. Arthur picked up a stick, though, and roughly sketched the landscape into the sand at his feet before finally curling up as much as his bruised body would allow and drifting off to a fitful sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Woo! This is my first posted fic in YEARS! This idea has been nagging me for a while now, and I saw a post that said something about readers being trash goblins so I might as well write my trash. Not that I think this is trash, I'm just no longer fettered by the need to write my magnum opus when all I really want is to read my own daydreams. The real challenge will be maintaining focus. I did a minimal amount of research because I'm the kind of person who ends up 79 pages into a wiki before realizing they forgot what they were looking up but knows it probably wasn't the Norman Conquest. Distances, places, geographic stuff will be...vague-ish.


End file.
